


Asymptote

by SaltCore



Series: Interpolation and Conjecture [2]
Category: Overwatch (Video Game)
Genre: Alcoholism, Angst, M/M, Unreliable Narrator, and other unhealthy coping mechanisms, gratuitous angst even, the happy ending is in another fic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-04-07
Updated: 2018-04-07
Packaged: 2019-04-19 14:01:40
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,317
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14238837
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SaltCore/pseuds/SaltCore
Summary: What’s the point of grasping at something that will be forever out of reach?(B-side to my ficDiscontinuityfrom Hanzo’s POV)





	Asymptote

**Author's Note:**

> This absolutely isn’t meant to stand on its own, but the tl;dr is (rot13.com to see) vf gung Wrffr naq Unamb jrer xrrcvat gurve eryngvbafuvc n frperg ohg Wrffr jnf uheg ba n zvffvba naq raqrq hc jvgu ergebtenqr nzarfvn, naq Unamb oynzrf uvzfrys sbe Wrffr’f vawhel.  
> This is set in roughly the fourth chapter, toward the beginning.

Hanzo steps into his bunk, pulling the door shut behind him. He leans back against it and wraps his arms around himself to stop his hands from shaking. His jaw hurts from clenching his teeth, but it doesn’t seem to want to loosen. He has to take a few deep breaths to get his traitorous body in line, but that’s the easy part. A traitorous heart isn’t so simple to tame.

He should just stop. Stop wandering the halls, stop haunting their old sanctuaries, stop holding out hope. Jesse doesn’t remember him. Will never remember him. His Jesse, the Jesse that loved him in spite of everything, is gone. All Hanzo is left with is a ghost that moves and sounds like him but will never _be_ him again.

Hanzo presses the heels of his hands into his eyes and bites his lip. It’s no worse than he deserves. His carelessness, his _selfishness_ took Jesse’s _life_ from him. Took Genji’s best friend from him. He deprived everyone here of a trusted comrade, a brother-in-arms.

All because he failed to deny himself something he never deserved.

Hanzo pushes himself away from the door and drags his heavy body toward the bed, shedding clothes as he does. He retrieves a bottle from under the bed and opens it, taking a long pull. He barely tastes it, but then he's not drinking for the taste. He pulls Jesse’s blue serape out from under the pillow; it’s one of the only things he kept. It’s selfish, but not as selfish as loving its owner in the first place.  He pulls it over his shoulders and lifts the hem to his nose.

It doesn’t smell like Jesse’s cologne anymore, but notes of tobacco smoke still linger. The rough, hardy weave of the fabric is still the same under his fingertips at least. It is a tough garment, worn, yes, but not worn thin. Much like its owner. Hanzo takes another drink, willing the dullness to settle over his senses and blunt his thoughts. The serape is a poor substitute for the man, but with enough drink Hanzo can make due.

His phone chirps from where it’s buried in his discarded clothes. Hanzo reaches out to free it. He checks the message—another text from Genji, asking where he is and if he’s eaten, _again._ The only one worse than him is Athena—and doesn’t reply, instead turning his phone off and setting it aside.

Hanzo leans back onto the bed, settling himself with his back to the wall. He’d never known a sanctuary like being ensconced between Jesse and the Watchpoint walls, but that’s one more luxury carelessness took from him. He hadn’t thought this bed large before, but it yawns out wide and empty now. He bunches the serape under his arm and presses it close to his chest and folds the pillow under his head so he’s propped up enough to keep drinking.

Somewhere on this bed is Jesse’s phone. He’d taken it _after_. He should have destroyed it, it would have been the sensible thing, removed the last of the evidence, but he couldn’t do it. He’d had to disable the radios in the phone to maintain the lie that it had been lost, and he can’t risk transferring any data off of it. All the computation runs through Athena in the end, and he couldn’t stop her from alerting Winston, or worse, Jesse.

Jesse had been the one to be bold enough to take pictures, and they’re all stored on this phone and this phone alone. Those pictures are the only windows Hanzo has left to their time together. It’s pitiful really that the only evidence they ever meant anything at all to each other can be held in his palm. It was a fragile, secret thing, but the loss of it twists deeper with every polite and impersonal greeting that falls from Jesse’s lips. Lips he is no longer permitted to touch. Hanzo lifts the bottle and drinks until the awkward angle makes him cough.

He punches in the PIN and the phone unlocks. He navigates to the folder containing the pictures almost without thinking. Not for the first time, he thinks Jesse took too many pictures of him. There are only a few with them both.

Jesse looks so happy in each one.

Hanzo pauses on one. Jesse’s smile is radiant, his lips pulled up over his teeth and his cheeks bunched up. He doesn’t smile like that anymore. He’s always wearing a disconcerted look, trying too hard to concentrate on things that should be automatic. Hanzo can’t stand seeing it. It’s too sharp a reminder that a stranger is wearing his lover’s skin.

Hanzo brushes his thumb over the curve of Jesse’s cheek, his thumb catching slightly on a scratch in the glass. He tries to remember the way the real thing would give under his touch. The gradient of texture as Jesse’s beard faded into his hair. The taste of the delicate skin under his ear and down his neck.

His eyes start to burn, and he closes them and grits his teeth. Jesse is safer away from him, he reminds himself. He is right to keep the truth of their relationship a secret because the association with Hanzo is why Jesse can't remember in the first place. Hanzo is the one who attracted the assassin, the one who walked them on that detour, the one who didn’t notice they were being following first. If he’d never let Jesse love him, this never would have happened. He’s never begrudged any hardship, any penance, but it is an especially cruel twist of fate that would see Jesse punished just for being near him. Hanzo might deserve this hurt, but Jesse does not. Everyone else here does not.

Hanzo bites his lip and lets the phone drop against the bed. After a few seconds, the screen dims and then shuts off, leaving him in darkness. He fists a hand in the serape. If only he’d been as careful as his heart was full. If only he’d been equal to the task of protecting what he held dear. This place had felt like a prison before, but now it’s so much worse.

He hadn’t known just how happy he was until he’d lost it.

His shoulders begin to shake, and his breath catches in his tightening throat. He clenches a fist and presses it to his mouth to stifle any sound that might escape. He’d chosen the room at the end of the hall for the privacy, but he still won’t risk someone hearing him. He couldn’t stand the sympathy, the pity.

He feels the scabs on his knuckles give and the cuts start bleeding again. He holds his hand out in the air so he can’t stain anything while they clot. He cannot give them time to heal, not until he’s sure he’ll never make the same mistakes he made that night ever again. The training droids are just as silent as the assassin was, and that training room almost as claustrophobic as the alley. He will relive that encounter until he defeats it. It’s the only way he can think to honor the memory of the love Jesse gave him.

He lifts the bottle to his mouth to drain the dregs, and it’s worse that tepid, it’s warm from his own body heat. Still, it’s doing its job. He can feel the heavy weight of sedation blunting even the grief.

Hanzo drops the bottle off the side of the bed and buries his face in the waded up serape. The fabric scratches his face, but it’s familiar and comforting. He can pretend it smells like Jesse used to, but it will never be warm like him, will never fill the hole he leaves. Still, it’s all he has, and it will have to be enough.

**Author's Note:**

> Fuckign discontinuity still haunts me I can’t let it go. If I ever rewrite something start to finish it’ll be that but even then I won’t be free. The song Tangles by Lady Lamb compelled me write this, especially the line _Loneliness, she is a whore. I take her to bed, I’m so sure she’ll be gone by the morning_
> 
> per usual, I'm hanging out and writing drabbles at https://saltytothecore.tumblr.com/


End file.
